Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine

"[Adrian Tomine] has more ideas in twenty panels than novelists have in a lifetime.”

—Zadie Smith

After enjoying over six months on the New York Times Bestseller list and receiving a rave review from the same institution, acclaimed cartoonist Adrian Tomine’s Killing and Dying is now available in paperback, with an updated cover and French flaps. With this work, Tomine (Shortcomings, Scenes from an Impending Marriage) reaffirms his place not only as one of the most significant creators of contemporary comics, but as one of the great voices of modern American literature. His gift for capturing emotion and intellect resonates: the weight of love and its absence, the pride and disappointment of family, the anxiety and hopefulness of being alive in the twenty-first century.

“Amber Sweet” shows the disastrous impact of mistaken identity in a hyper-connected world; “A Brief History of the Art Form Known as Hortisculpture” details the invention and destruction of a vital new art form; “Translated, from the Japanese,” is a lush, full-color display of storytelling through still images; the title story, "Killing and Dying," centers on parenthood, mortality, and stand-up comedy. In six interconnected, darkly funny stories, Tomine forms a quietly moving portrait of contemporary life.

Adrian Tomine is a master of the small gesture, equally deft at signaling emotion via a subtle change of expression or writ large across landscapes illustrated in full color. Killing and Dying is a fraught, realist masterpiece.

Praise for Killing and Dying

Adrian Tomine can draw, think, write and feel. He sees everything, he knows everything; he’s in your apartment, he’s on the subway, he’s in your dreams. He knows about aging baseball fans and delusional horticulturists, he knows hapless fathers and awkward nerd-girl stand-ups, he knows the single and the married, the mad and the sane, knows when to use a speech a bubble and when silence is enough. He has more ideas in twenty panels than novelists have in a lifetime.

This new collection of six interconnected graphic stories is as masterfully wrought as past achievements like Sleepwalk and Summer Blonde, and just as hauntingly evocative of modern American loneliness, anxiety, and hope...Tomine pays attention to the minute gestures: a nervous cross-and-re-cross of the arms, the brief moment when someone glances down at their feet between sentences.

Imagine Raymond Carver’s writing sensibilities overlaid with Edward Hopper’s art (or vice versa) and the end result might be Adrian Tomine’s graphic short stories: they are serious literature in a graphic form. Tomine’s work is spare yet dense and every image and word counts. His new collection brings together six interconnected, yet stylistically diverse stories.

Tomine may be my favorite comics artist — deft and subtle, with a bittersweet understanding of the tension between aspiration and loss...Moving, sharply rendered, these are comics where the real action takes place between the lines.

Graphically, Tomine excels at imbuing every figure—big or small—with individualized traits (hands on hips, cocked shoulder), giving the sense that the story’s focus could shift deep into the background and still find rich, full life. Achingly human and divinely rendered.

Tomine’s lines are so clean and precise, his compositions so natural-looking, that it’s easy to treat his images as transparent vessels of meaning, the cellophane wrapper enfolding the tart, bright candy of the plot. But even his smallest, plainest panels are heavy with subtext, thick with unstated emotion and full of the kind of information that can never quite be conveyed in language.

As a serious cartoonist, one secretly hopes to create “That Book”: a book that can be passed to a literary-minded person who doesn’t normally read comics; one that doesn’t require any explanation or apology in advance and is developed enough in its attitude, humanity and complexity that it speaks maturely for itself... Adrian Tomine’s Killing and Dying may finally be That Book, and I’m amazed and heartened by it.

One of art comic's most revered talents returns with his latest collection of emotionally haunting tales of American life. Think the best of what '90s independent cinema was going for, but with better a better aesthetic.